Gerard Damiano, 80, Dies; Directed ‘Deep Throat’

Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser turned filmmaker whose best-known work, “Deep Throat,” created sensation in every possible meaning of the term when it was released in 1972, died on Saturday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 80 and had lived in Fort Myers in recent years.

The cause was complications of a stroke he had last month, his son, Gerard Jr., said.

Written and directed by Mr. Damiano under the name Jerry Gerard, “Deep Throat” was “pornography’s ‘Gone With the Wind’ in terms of grosses,” The New York Times wrote in 1973. It attained emblematic status as one of the first hard-core films to reach a wide general audience, from self-conscious Middle Americans to self-congratulatory celebrities. “Porno chic,” the news media often called it.

Over three and a half decades, “Deep Throat” has been damned by religious groups, decried by feminists, defended by First Amendment advocates, derided by critics and debated by social scientists. It dragged for years through local and federal courts around the country in a welter of obscenity trials in which it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned. All this had the effect, observers agreed, of sustaining acute public interest in the film.

In what was perhaps the movie’s most enduring legacy, its title became the pseudonym of The Washington Post’s clandestine source in its coverage of the Watergate scandal. In 2005, W. Mark Felt, a former second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, identified himself as Deep Throat.

“Deep Throat” was shot in six days for not much more than $25,000 — money put up, as has been widely reported, by associates of the Colombo crime family. By 2005 it had grossed more than $600 million, Entertainment Weekly reported.

The film’s premise was medical in nature. Its attractive young heroine suffered from a condition previously unrecorded in the annals of science, which The Times Magazine in 1973 described as “an eccentricity of her anatomy” that caused her to find oral sex “more gratifying than conventional intercourse.”

With the film, Mr. Damiano gave its star, née Linda Boreman, what is generally believed to have been her first speaking role. He also bestowed upon her the screen name Linda Lovelace. In later years, Ms. Boreman denounced the film as depicting her “rape.” She died in 2002, of injuries suffered in an auto accident.

“Deep Throat” had a small renaissance in 2005, with the release of “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary history of the film. In the documentary, a spate of luminaries, among them Dick Cavett, Susan Brownmiller and Helen Gurley Brown, hold forth on “Deep Throat’s” s enduring cultural significance.

Gerardo Rocco Damiano was born in New York City on Aug. 4, 1928. As a youth, he worked as a shoeshine boy in Times Square and as a busboy in a Manhattan Automat. At 17, he joined the Navy, serving four years.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. Damiano spent 12 years as an X-ray technician at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. He later became a hairdresser, with three successful beauty shops in Queens.

An avid amateur photographer who shot weddings and baby pictures, Mr. Damiano began his film career in the late 1960s at the suggestion of his accountant.

Mr. Damiano’s three marriages ended in divorce. His second marriage, to Barbara Walton, produced two children: Gerard Jr., of Fort Myers and Queens, and a daughter, Christar, of Fort Myers. They are his only immediate survivors.

In interviews over the years, Mr. Damiano credited his work as a hairdresser with having given him a keen understanding of women. This helped him greatly, he made clear, in his later career.

“I was just a nice guy, which is why I think I did pretty well,” he told The News-Press of Fort Myers in 2005. “I mean, I’d meet an actress and have to say, ‘Sit down, take your clothes off — I’m going to ask you to do some nasty things.’ You have to be pretty nice.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Gerard Damiano, 80, Dies; Directed ‘Deep Throat’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe